There have been hundreds of horrific
stories from the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other Nazi
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Book Reviews

Journal of Historical Review

Fall 1986

pp. 369-372

Auschwitz:
True Tales from a Grotesque Land
by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. Translated by Roslyn Hirsch. Edited
by Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch.Chapel
Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press,
1985, xii + 185 pp, ISBN 0-8078-4160-9.

Reviewed by Theodore J. O'Keefe

Auschwitz: True Tales
from a Grotesque Land is a
collection of stories garnered by Sara
Nomberg-Przytyk, allegedly during the year she spent at
the Auschwitz concentration camp between January 1944 and
January 1945. For the most part the tales she recounts are
from the stock repertory of the Auschwitz "survivor":
incredible brutality and callousness on the part of the
Germans, noble endurance or brutish self-interest among the
inmates, poignant romances, miraculous escapes, mass
exterminations.

Some of these things Mrs. Nomberg-Przytyk claims to have
witnessed; others she has at second or third hand. Dr.
Mengele bulks larger than life, as usual, demonic and
indefatigable, dispensing lethal injections, tormenting
dwarves, and consigning the unfortunate to the gas chambers
with his customary gusto. Ilse Koch appears, in a
cameo role, as "commander of the camp," presiding over a
ceremonial execution which is forestalled by a grisly
suicide. Several well-known Auschwitz legends are recounted,
including the end of the Gypsy camp; the death of a German
NCO, shot by a Jewess with his own pistol; and the escape,
recapture, and sad end of two star-crossed lovers.

A number of features of life at Auschwitz as told by the
author have an incontestable basis in historical fact. She
presents rather well the role of the prisoner hierarchy,
which exercised considerable authority over every aspect of
the inmates' existence, an authority which by all accounts
the prisoner Kapos (foremen) and Blockälteste (barracks
chiefs) often misused. The powerful Communist infrastructure
in the camp is touched on (Mrs. NombergPrzytyk is anything
but unsympathetic to the Communists). Her focus on the
Germans' strenuous efforts to safeguard their charges'
health in infirmaries, hospitals, and quarantine stations,
as well as through preventive measures (baths and gas
chambers for delousing inmates and their clothing) is in
incongruous contrast to the supposed function of Auschwitz
as an extermination center.

Nevertheless, the critical
reader, particularly one with some knowledge of
Auschwitz, will have more a few doubts as to the accuracy
of Mrs. Nomberg-Przytyk's stories, even if he is a
convinced Exterminationist. Does the author really
imagine that Ilse Koch was at Auschwitz? (She was never
anywhere near the place.) How could a Greek girl
temporarily evade her fate by leaping from a second-story
window after being led into the gas chamber, when all the
buildings alleged to have housed gas chambers were either
of one story or had underground gas chambers? Is it
conceivable that Dr. Mengele had his cruel sport with a
whole family of full-grown, 50 centimeter-tall midgets
(that's less than 20 inches)?

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's funny way with facts is clearly
perturbing to the editors, David H. Hirsch, a
professor of English at Brown, and Eli Pfefferkorn,
director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council. In an "Editorial Afterword" the two make a labored
analysis. They tell us:

"It is one of the still unresolved problems of
that body of writings called Holocaust literature that
the events seem to overwhelm all attempts to impose
formal order, either of literary history or literary
criticism. The problem of ordering, categorizing, and
interpreting is further exacerbated by the perverse
efforts of so-called revisionist historians who deny
everything, deny that the Nazis "exterminated millions of
Jews and others, thereby placing an additional burden on
those who wish to study the ways in which imagination
modifies memory and fiction vitalizes history."

Sorry, but this won't wash. Either Professor Hirsch has
so restricted his scholarship to browsing amid the dry
stubble of literary realism that he is incapable of
analyzing imaginative literature, or he and his collaborator
don't know what literary criticism and literary history are,
in which case they might be advised to seek out a qualified
scholar of, say, the Homeric question, an expert in Biblical
exegesis, or a specialist in the composition and
transmission of folk literature.

A third possibility, of course, is that Hirsch and
Pfefferkom are attempting to blur the boundaries between
fiction and history relegating the less credible elements of
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's "tales" to the realm of literary
fancy, or "dramatization," as they refer to it. It is
difficult, after all, to distinguish between the allegedly
literary efforts of Mrs. Nomberg-Przyiyk and the accounts of
such Auschwitz inmates as Filip Müller, whose
Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years the
Gas Chambers, despite its supposed "simple,
straightforward language," its lack of "embellishment" and
"deviation" (according to Professor Yehuda Bauer's
foreword), employs many of the same threadbare literary
arfifices as Tales from a Grotesque Land .

It is instructive that the editors take refuge in a
characteristic pronouncement of Holocaust Kabbalist and
Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, in reference to his
own Holocaust writings: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe.
Some events do take place but are not true; others are,
although they never occurred" (Legends
of Our Time, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1968, p. viii).

Holocaust Revisionists will not likely be deterred from
examining with a cold eye the literature of the
concentration camps by such formulas as this. They will
continue to wonder at such details as Filip Müller's
crematory ovens, supposedly capable of completely disposing
of nine corpses per hour, or at the miraculous escape of
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's Fela, who escapes death by hiding in
the chimney of the hearse bringing her to the crematorium,
and draw their own conclusions about a literature which
increasingly seems devoid of either Dichtung or Warheit
.

Students of the "Holocaust" will be thankful to the
author and her editors for several passages that have the
ring of truth, however, particularly that which concludes
her book. Sara, who escaped from the Germans in the chaos of
the last days of the war (she had been removed from
Auschwitz to first one, then another camp in central
Germany), makes her way back to the Polish city of Lublin in
a freight train crammed with Poles. Keeping her own counsel
in the car in which she sits surrounded by the Poles, she
muses, "They could strangle me in this terrible car if they
found out that I am a Red." Soon they arrive in Lublin, and
Auschwitz: True Tales from a
Grotesque Land closes with these two
paragraphs:

"At twelve noon the door suddenly slid open. We
were in Lublin. I was the first one to leave. As I
reached the street, I was greeted by a colorful Easter
procession. There was a colorful crowd of women dressed
in their native costumes, children and elegant men. There
was no room on the street. All of the balconies and
windows were decorated with rugs, flowers and pictures of
the Holy Family.

"So this is Poland. I understood the words of the
Polish soldiers whom I met on the border: "Don't tell the
people you meet that you are a Communist." The fight has
not ended. A fight takes time." (p. 161)

These ringing words will doubtless discomfit those Poles
and Polish-Americans who imagine that there is room on the
Holocaust bandwagon for them, too, as will the involvement
of Mr. Pfefferkorn from the taxpayer-supported Holocaust
Memorial Council. The fact that the team of Pfefferkorn,
Hirsch, and Hirsch's wife Roslyn, who translated the book
from the original Polish, were supported at every step in
the way by tax-exempt "philanthropy" (The Sigmund Strochlitz
Foundation, The Brown Faculty Development Fund, the American
Philosophical Society) will likely be of little solace
either. Those from less favored ethnic and religious groups
may console themselves with the observation that, even
though the Holocaust bandwagon is full, there is plenty of
room in the traces for willing drayhorses.